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For this third volume in Hyperion's Brahms Songs cycle, Graham Johnson is joined by the young German tenor Simon Bode in his debut recording for the label. Equally at home in the opera house and the recital hall, Bode's is a voice fusing control a ...» More

Graham Johnson is both mastermind and pianist in this series of Brahms’s complete songs. Volume 4 presents the bass-baritone Robert Holl, famed for his weighty interpretations of this repertoire. Included are all songs of Op 94, as well as the Vie ...» More

Accompanied by Eugene Asti, Sarah Connolly sings songs by Haydn, Brahms, Hahn, Korngold and Weill. Her distinctive, intelligent, warm, bright-sounding mezzo-soprano will be enjoyed by her growing 'army' of fans in this rich, romantic repertoire.» More

It is curious to imagine Brahms writing a bagatelle like this at the same time as Wolf was working on his Mörike, Eichendorff and Goethe songbooks—the art of the lied as profound as it was ever destined to be. This Ständchen would almost be at home in Sigmund Romberg’s Heidelberg-inspired operetta The Student Prince, although that work has a famous Serenade of its own. The Brahms song has been compared to the charming and amusing paintings of the Biedermeier artist, Spitzweg: it has charm, grace and compositional skill, but it lacks the deep personal touch to which we have become accustomed in the composer’s great lieder. Brahms found the anodyne poem in the historian Franz Kugler’s Gedichte (1840), although the poem had already appeared in his Skizzenbuch (1830), wherein every drawing, poem and piece of music (including the first setting of Chamisso’s Frauenliebe und -leben) is Kugler’s own work. Flute, violin and zither are mentioned in the poem’s second verse (and occasion a famous interlude where these instruments are allowed to let rip under the pianist’s rippling fingers) but the opening music suggests a strummed guitar. All is prancing delight between the hands, an energy moderated by dream-like longing. The joining-in of the voice at the end of the fourth bar produces a contrapuntal weave as delicate as moonbeams or water gently plashing in the garden’s fountain. The minor-key shading of ‘Stille’ (denoting some kind of exciting conspiracy), the delicate implied parenthesis of ‘im Schatten’, the way the three serenaders gradually become bold enough to sing their hearts out (an upbeat repeat of ‘Und singen und spielen dabei’)—these details add immeasurably to the pleasing shape of the whole. The third verse is a musical repeat of the first where the same music serves the words equally well—Brahms can be a master of strophic songs when he chooses to be. But there is a new level of intimacy at the end as the message ‘Vergiß nicht mein’ is whispered in the ear of a particular blonde. As often with this composer, the differentiation of expression, via rubato and colour change, is entirely left to the performers’ discretion; some singers (like Elisabeth Schumann) have taken outrageous liberties here to great poetical effect: it is difficult to believe that this was not what Brahms himself intended.

The late masterpiece ‘Ständchen’ catches folkloric-Germanic nostalgia in a nutshell: moonlight over the mountains, a fountain plashing in the gardens, and three blond students serenading a beloved who whispers ‘Remember me’ in her dreams. Brahms responds by roving lightly between various transient tonalities, as if from one beautiful place to another; appropriately enough for a song about student life and loves, the song is related in some of its procedures to the Academic Festival Overture.

The moon shines over the mountain, Just right for people in love; A fountain purls in the garden Otherwise silence far and wide. By the wall in the shadows, Three students stand With flute and fiddle and zither, And sing and play. The sounds steal softly into the dreams Of the loveliest of girls, She sees her lair-headed love And whispers 'Remember me!'

This is a very welcome thing in a line-up of Brahms lieder, a song of carefree geniality and charm—the latter specifically called for by the word Anmutig in the tempo marking. The Simrock setting of the same name and in the same original tonality has a sturdier, less whimsical appeal, but E major was clearly an outdoor key in Brahms’s mind. The composer was close friends with Marie Fellinger, a gifted artist and photographer, the daughter of the poet Köstlin who had taken the pseudonym of Reinhold. It was she who had brought these verses to the composer’s attention and he repaid this act of daughterly piety by setting four Reinhold poems, the most famous of which is Nachtigall, Op 97 No 1.

The song is introduced by a rowing motif, six semiquavers followed by three quavers deployed between the hands. This suggests perfectly setting off on a journey in a boat. There is a gentle forward propulsion as oars dip into the water with each staccato chord that plashes in the bass clef. In the fourth bar, just before the entry of the voice, we hear the first hemiola of the piece—a typically Brahmsian trademark where 6/8 changes to 3/4. This seems indicative of a lightness of heart, a hop, skip and a jump, in looking forward to the freedom of a day out on the lake. This intrusion of 3/4 into the barcarolle rhythm continues as a feature of the song, delightfully varying the musical flow and mirroring the unpredictability of watery swells and eddies. The poet fancifully requests the lake to nestle up to the boat and take good care of it; this gives rise to arpeggios that ripple down the stave delicately cradling and jostling the vessel while pressing the vocal line gently forward. We gather that on board there is a certain amount of nestling up and taking care between the lovers. Fragments of accompanying counter-melody, quavers phrased in duplets, are traced by the fourth and fifth fingers of the right hand as if delineating the crests of capricious wavelets.

In the second strophe the changes of harmony suggest that the sailors have experienced a moment of slightly hectic uncertainty, but they are having fun nevertheless. The chromatic melody for these increasingly boisterous waves (‘Deine Wellen rauschen’) is new; the return of the familiar tune of the opening suggests the momentary re-establishment of a more even keel. The third strophe (‘Deine Wellen zittern’) takes place even further from the shore and intensifies this sense of adventure, the chromatic excursion adding colour to the glinting movement of semiquavers in both hands.

The song now gets faster and faster (immer belebter) as if the boat were dematerializing or spiriting its occupants aloft. The description of a real day on the lake now changes into a metaphor for the ecstatic happiness of the two lovers; for the poem’s fourth verse the opening tune has a different kind of fleet accompaniment. The closing verse brings a change of mood and tempo to depict the idyllic isolation of a patch of Eden afloat on earthly waters. The waves are stilled (immer ruhiger werdend) and there is a suggestion of nightfall. The boat, having reached its destination of imaginary paradise, bobs gently up and down on a lake that now seems an enchanted realm. Quavers that alternate between the hands suggest stasis; above these, the little finger of the pianist’s right hand pricks out a long and mysterious note on the tonic that sounds again with gentle repetitions in the following bars. It is hard to decide what, if anything, these sounds are meant to evoke: perhaps the sound of church bells from the shore (Debussy ends some of his most atmospheric songs with distant tintinnabulations at nightfall), or perhaps a distant and mournful warning from the lakeshore, as if a ship’s foghorn, that the day’s excursions are over. It may be that Eric Sams is correct in simply interpreting this unusual and haunting effect as the composer’s means of depicting ‘effortless floating in eternity’.

The musical means employed in this song are relatively simple, but strikingly original. The effect of dream-like stillness, the suspension of reality, the strangeness of a world of fairytale visions, all are created by placing musical weight on the third beat of the bar which makes the supposedly strong beat that follows appear weak—a cross-barline trompe-l’oreille. This conjures an extraordinary sense of frozen time and hovering unease. Elisabet von Herzogenberg found the minims ‘languid and laborious’ but she had clearly not understood what the composer was trying to do, and was also repelled by the sheer strangeness and modernity of the music. In this same year Hugo Wolf composed his Mörike songs, a series of masterpieces that threatened to topple the older man’s song-writing supremacy, but in Es hing der Reif Brahms shows that he can evoke as cold and empty a landscape of frozen emotions (and dream up as original a song) as the composer of Das verlassene Mägdlein.

Four-note arpeggios in the left hand drift upwards in dreamy reverie, and the song’s marking specifically confirms that this is the desired mood. But the first of these three left-hand notes anticipates by a quaver the chord that is the perversely emphasized third beat of the bar. This increases the sense of disorientation in this music, the impression of dragging behind the beat which adds a heavy, benumbing note to the music. The unimportant words ‘der’ and ‘im’ are placed on these emphasized third beats (bars 5 and 6) as well as being set higher in the voice than ‘hing’ and ‘Reif’. This is breaking every rule of word-setting, as only a master at the height of his powers is able to do and get away with it.

For the poem’s second verse (‘Und offen stand das Fenster dein’) the accompanying pattern changes and the vocal line is largely unaccompanied; the pianist’s interjections illustrate the tentative nature of peeking into someone else’s bedroom. The appearance of the beloved (‘Da tratst du in den Sonnenschein’), a fairy princess in this metaphor, transforms the opening accompaniment into something warmer and friendlier where A minor is replaced with A flat major, a tonality associated with worshipping the beloved, albeit unrequitedly (as in Ein Sonett, track 4). In his dream the singer trembles at the sight of his beloved (‘Ich bebt’). Even by Brahms’s unconventional standards the placing of the word ‘in’ on a high A (‘in seligem Genuß’) seems ill-advised, but it works here because the ‘blissful pleasure’ is revealed as something far more painful and shocking. The way the song subsides from its moment of near-happiness back to the frozen emotional wastes of the opening is achieved by a vocal line that slowly winds its way down the stave, a graduated and disillusioned retreat. The final phrase of the song (‘Daß Frost und Winter war’) incorporates the ghost of the final vocal cadence of Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger, another song with a supernatural scenario that takes place outside the beloved’s house and with even more devastating consequences. This also confirms that Groth’s lyric contains certain echoes of Heinrich Heine’s poetry. The piano’s postlude, an A minor chord decorated with a protracted and mournful passing note, is chilling and bleak.

The poem is from the Von den Kunst section of the Swiss poet Adolf Frey’s Gedichte (1886) and it seems made especially for Brahms; indeed there was scarcely a more self-conscious selection of a text by this composer. It is interesting to know that he not only was aware of the veracity of the poem’s last line when applied to his own songs (and a reason why many people dislike his music), but that he was unrepentant about the dark moods he evoked in so many lieder. The declaration of this song is no rueful mea culpa, rather it seems worn by Brahms as a badge of pride, or at the very least an unashamed manifesto. Eric Sams writes of this song that it ‘floats free yet seems sombre, like a bird at twilight’. The pianistic style is prophetic of the less demanding pieces (Opp 118 and 119) written some years later for Clara Schumann—strands of quavers drifting down the stave, tendrils of sound leading to gentle and haunting harmonic flowerings of shy and subtle beauty. This is an enchanting intermezzo of evanescent poetic substance, music about music, and a companion piece for that other song that attempts to describe the creative process, Wie Melodien, Op 105 No 1, with a poem by Klaus Groth.

The connection between this ‘Wanderer’ and the winter traveller of Schubert’s Winterreise is very clear. In gehender Bewegung is a marking that Schubert used for that cycle, and the key of F minor is the one in which Brahms would have accompanied the baritone Stockhausen in Der Wegweiser, the song in the Schubert cycle to which Ein Wanderer is most closely related. (If F minor is the baritone key for Der Wegweiser, it is a demandingly high one for a tenor in the Brahms—indeed the emotional temperature of Ein Wanderer appears especially intense in this original tonality.) By the time Brahms composed this song the collaboration with Stockhausen was a distant memory but Schubert and his music were very much still on the agenda. Brahms was a lifelong enthusiast and a collector of the composer’s manuscripts and he was deeply involved as an adviser for the preparation of the new Schubert Gesamtausgabe where the songs would eventually appear under the inspired editorship of his protégé, Eusebius Mandyczewski.

The time-signature is 2/4, four quavers in the bar, like Der Wegweiser. The two chords of the opening bar are something of a signpost that points the traveller in the direction of his sad fate. The image of diverging paths is aptly illustrated by the way in which the semiquaver accompaniment for ‘Hier, wo sich die Straßen scheiden’ goes in opposite directions beneath the hands. For ‘Meiner ist der Weg der Leiden’, the pianist’s left hand, forcibly establishing its independence with a sforzato on the second quaver of the bar, acts as a deadweight that pulls the accompaniment into the Stygian regions of the bass clef. Again this illustrates a divergent path: as the piano burrows in the depths the singer rises to the top of the stave for a vehement confirmation of his continuing bad luck in love (‘Des ich immer sicher bin’). Friedländer mentions Brahms’s love of Hungarian folk-music in connection with this song and maybe it does have some bearing; the singer is certainly more temperamental and excitable than Schubert’s protagonist.

As an introduction to the second verse, the signpost motif (two descending crotchet chords, a third apart) is now heard lower than before. We are set up to expect a strophic repetition but it is nothing so simple. The accompaniment is busy and the harmonic scheme restlessly inventive; this is very far from Schubert’s trudging linear manner in a barren landscape—in fact this terrain seems positively hilly by comparison. In the middle of the verse (at ‘Keiner wird mich doch verstehen’) a dotted motif renders the journey surprisingly spiky and jerky—perhaps an attempt to depict the playing down of grief with an assumed cheerfulness for the benefit of the other travellers who ask where he is going. Surprisingly, the words ‘wo ich zu Haus’ prompt a pair of melodramatic pianistic flourishes, the most dramatic music of the piece—as if he does not want to actually say that death and the grave are on the agenda, but he is prepared to drop a heavy hint.

The words of the third strophe are nearest in spirit to the no-room-at-the-inn pathos of Das Wirtshaus in Schubert’s cycle, but once again this music is far too active and passionate to invite any true comparison with Schubert. Under ‘Reiche Erde, arme Erde’ there is the muffled drum of a death march and the harmonic direction of the music pulls the narrator, swearing eternal devotion, ineluctably to the grave. The song is full of Brahmsian skill but Reinhold’s poem does not serve the composer well, despite his fondness for Maria Fellinger, the poet’s daughter. This traveller wears his heart far too much on his sleeve genuinely to engage our sympathies; as a result Ein Wanderer is very seldom performed on the concert platform.